Why do you think they've had a 2.4 GHz chip for nearly 3 years now!!! They can't just throw them away because finished chips are still worth more than their weight in gold! but they can't just drop the prices to move chips either... that ruins the market for the future when you have to have prices back up. Intel wants to charge a little more each year instead of always the same...if they chicken out now and drop prices to move short term inventory they ruin the gradual price rising scheme...people will just wait for another chip sale!! Of course they can't release a NEW chip in these conditions either [until they clear inventory]. so that leaves them vaunerable to AMD moving in to one-up them with something new they can't market yet. It explains why the industry has been so stalled for the last 2.5-3 years now..there's no reason for 4GHZ+ chips when they can't sell the ones they already got.. but hey, it's good for business because it provides a level foundation to build from...much like 1999 and the P2/P3/CEL BX motherboards did.
frankly it shows poor taste in the judge to even keep it AT the court house... should have been gone home the same day. Many people in power [particulary southern people in power] don't like to realize that their inactions and passive actions [like keeping a penis pump anywhere near a court of law!] have unintended concequences...not to mention they set an unprofessional tone in what are really life-or-death situations for people on the other side of that bench. It's a classic case of where he left the door open for somebody to exploit his penis pump situation...and perhaps opened a door for temptation himself he wouldn't normally have had.
How is John Kerry the Anti-christ...just because he believes in abortion being not-illegal... grow up and stop letting your pastor/priest make your choices for you! The far-right has enjoyed near "fundamentalist" followings in the last 2 decades and it's really scary.
In all reality Bush is closer to being anti-christ than kerry...he seems hell bent on couquing the middle east for "christanity" and bringing "peace" to Jersuelem... while pressing an oppressive "stamp on your forhead" homeland security/runnaway corporation landscape back at home.
anyway it's all irrelevant because the AC [isn't that a coincidence!] will be revealed AFTER all the christians are gone [rapture, 3.5 years of bliss, then Doom on earth!]...so stop worrying about it and pay attention to what's really going on right now!
YOUR AN AMERICAN DAMN IT! STOP VOTING YOUR RELIGION AND THINK!!!
Actually, I comment quite often to rabid Clinton-haters that He was actually quite a good republican president... he shrunk govt, worked toward a balanced budget, and generally gave up pushing most of his more "socialist" leanings...while at the same time those "socialist" leanings have become much more important 4 years after he's out of office than when he pushed them in the first "100 days". In the end
Clinton left all the companies alone in the dot com/bomb and energy scandles...just like a good republican!! He pretty much left the ecomomy to the REPUBLICAN experts because of the republican congress...and look how they screwed it up! Now Bush has done EVERY THING the papers ridiculed Clinton for...promising elderly health care, invading small countries, ballooning the Fed Govt, and expanding "gun control" via the "patriot" act to orwellian levels... the only thing Clinton screwed up was monica's dress... Bush is tempting a third world war for the first time in 30 years, the American people just haven't figured it out yet!
not to mention how the president has routinely appointed hyper-right-wing activists to his cabinet positions... giving these people power to "intrpet" the law in terms of who they choose to fine, arrest, and grant rights too [think half the posts on./ about Ashcroft, Powell, and co!]
Look at it this way, Republicans are successful ruling by executive fiat...as much as they are against bureacracy they seem to excel at using it as leverage for their moral crusades behind the scenes in the shadows... Democrats on the other hand seek to pull this stuff out of the shadows after the damage has been done for years using the judiciary... showing time and again where unbridaled fiat is mearly tyrany in the shadows....under a pretense of "law".
In short Democrats wouldn't appoint so many "activist" judges if the Republicans didn't abuse their authority to further their religous moral positions.
But they could still copy the playlists a day later because radio stations are required to send them in electronically to a private company mandated by the FCC for royalty purposes. MS is just buying a feed from that private company! The playlist [without DJ commentary] is just public info you could get by a normal person listening...
Legally they are in the clear....but if the anti-trust people are watching it's time to nail um to the wall!
great link about how elections REALLY work in a republic. the electoral college is where the election is really at....perhaps it's time to amend those state constitutions so the 2 party system isn't so powerful!!! If all the states took back charge like Maine and Nebraska there would be no more election fraud.
Like in any good game it's all about following the rules and letting the game play out! That was THE fundamental flaw of the 2000 election...proper protocol was not followed by the media in order to create a sensation...
too bad you didn't get a lawyer...depending on how long ago this was you probably still could. What position in the class would you have had would you not have missed out those weeks... If you would have been #1 or 2 it's a BIG deal...you should fight to get that position back and strip it from those who got it wrongly!!! What they did was legally wrong.. because they used a "warrant" for one crime to get evidence of another...clearly searching for a gun in a purse is not the same as searching for small nail clippers or a pack of OTC pills against school policy...not the law. You should have went to the school board about this...
Stuff like this really burns me...because while they didn't like what you did, it wasn't wrong...not by a long shot... for a matter of fact what the school did by calling the sheriff WAS a criminal act...if the teacher or principle did it knowingly!!! This is the problem with our govt authority of late...you were publicly humiliated, even if you could find out that somebody outright lied it would be swept under the rug as "water under the bridge" but if you got lucky you could get some tenured teachers fired and jailed!!!
there used to be many stations that put simul-casts of their on-air broadcast on the web...unedited & free...
Until....
MS and real swooped in with the "streaming media" patents, and the RIAA lobbied to the FCC to change the rules so that the Radio stations couldnt' broadcast without paying outrageous fees!!!!
so after the real, paying radio stations have been effectively put out of online business, the desktop OS monopoly with deep pockets swoops in and not just mimics them but has the gull to copy their playlists...
How can they exactly copy the playlists you'd ask? because the radio stations and online stations are mandated by the FCC to send in the playlists to a PRIVATE CORPORATIION so that the royalties can be accounted for... a private corporation that is now selling those lists to MS...
The only Good THing that should be comming from this is a break-up of MS...they just added a music store over the heads of their paying customers, now they use their pull to do an end run around the local radio stations.... This should be the "step too far" because local radio is tight with the politicans...Congress will read these letters...and hopefully do something about it this time!!!
The article has a GREAT point...there's no reason that companies shouldn't persuade a large company like IBM to add Debian to it's supported list...
It's truely free and fully open source, support is just about as good as Red Hat or Suse [again unless you're willing to paybig bucks], forward and backward releases are supported fully...no pressure to upgrade on a company's timetable, and software compatiblity is of the highest level... In a nutshell Debian IS Linux!
What's needed in the general OSS movement is to get more corperate interest in the grassroots OSS movements... Personally, I'm a Suse fan...because they have some great IBM hardware ports [like iSeries/AS400!] but realistically, distros like Gentoo and Debian are the future of software...companies like RH & Suse are attempts to strap "traditonal" lock-in software business to OSS/Linux... they are bound to fail...and leave you holding the bag. The beauty of Gentoo and Debian is that anybody can bolt anything they want on to the very stable bases...and when the base changes it's easy to work the changes into your custom software...they are DESIGNED to do just what most companies need!!!
As far as stability and compatibility, isn't it an open joke that the current version of Debian Stable is pushing 3 years old...I'd call that a pretty reliable standard base...better than ANY of the corperate Linuii.
or having your companies white house privilages revoked!!! That's the big one that popped in the news just after 9/11 then vanished....
during the various invasions the white house "quitely hinted" that news sources were to use only OFFICAL channels and that reporting "too soon" would get them cut off. That's one reason why the prisoner abuse scandle took 6 months to play out...but enough big media outlets had the story to "call the bluff" and prevent themselves from being all cut off...otherwise we'd have never heard about it!
Except that most libertarians don't mind the govt extending copyrights or patents for longer periods...nor do they mind the "moral" laws..like those made against gay or other "malcontents" they just want the govt to ignore BUSINESS laws... which would be fine if they enforced laws on the little people with the same force... I.e. it's OK for businesses to use unfair labor practices to make extra profit by cheating workers from OT...if it's ok for clerks to steal from the register... see...it's all just a point of view.. the fact that companies have a lot more money at stake doesn't change the moral issues!
You mention the "freest" time being homesteading...well that's not possible anymore...in the IT world [where everything is essentially zero-value neblous ideas] everything is patents and copyrights...specifically to PREVENT other people from getting THEIR free shot! The fundamental problem with outsourcing is that it's AMERICAN companies using AMERICAN dollars [and hiding behind the AMERICAN soldier when things get bad!] their not really providing opportunities for any foriegn workers...just starting american-style corporations where those workers have FERWER rights than we do here. Note that WIPO is specifically designed to keep those "workers" and even the foreign partners from EVER starting their own companies in direct competition with our american countries...so they can never cut out the american business man...like he cut out the american worker!
except that the US doesn't manufacture many consumer goods anymore...most of those were outsorced in the 70's. Most of the US exports are food or capital equipment....the food won't be outsorced any time soon, but the capital eqipment is the crown-jewels of the country! What's being outsourced are the jobs that make american companies great...meaning that it's not important to grow those people here at home....sort of a self-fufilling prophesy.
you do $90k worth of work for 10 years...then the company takes the profits from YOUR work and builds the NEW office overseas.... that's what outsorcing is REALLY about!
It's not about an Indian company starting up and competing for contracts...it's about Your AMERICAN bosses taking the profits of YOUR hard work, inventiveness, and loyalty and cashing in for a quick buck for people in some petty dictatorship they don't have to pay a fair wage.
In most cases companies are spending MORE money on outsorcing and reaping far short of the returns they're supposed to...It's so bad the US SEC is trying to regulate outside countries business practices! What SHOULD be happening is to let the overseas investments hang...just like the US workers have been hung out....but that won't happen...we just send in the army to invade.... That's the REAL reason we hate Cuba so much. They were on their way to american business takeover like hawaii when the commies took over and took their country back from american business by force!! That's also why terrorism is such a big deal...because we can't REALLY lock down the country because we expect all the forigners to be trained here...and we have to protect all those american business men overseas selling our jobs from the locals that don't want them either!!!
Except when the person accross from you is your wife...and the phone keeps on ringing! Like the parent said, it's technology becomming abusive of private time...and it makes PROPER time management hell. You need to have private time to be a balanced person and devote time to the other relationships in your life that REALLY matter.
The text message, on the other hand, could be telling you that....your wife left you...
because it's the only way she can get thru to you...I see it all the time lately...people ignoring the people around them for another "meaningless" business call. Untill one day the people "around" them get the hint and go away...they call when they really want something!!!
MS isn't complacent with IE...they've just conqured the desktop computer space and want to make money with development elsewhere. Like...MSN! the MSN browser [which only works with MSN's service..go figure!] has all sorts of firefox/Mozilla like features...plus some other ones that are MSN only...like passport/hotmail integration... IE is the "entry level" product, it's a loss leader so you'll buy another service to "fix" the built in functionality's shortcommings... And that's what Windows XP is all about! giving customers enough to get started, but then requiring serious users to buy-up for "professional" features...
and THAT is why MS is "so great" for the software industry! [at least THEIR reasoning]
The whole trouble with these DMCA takedown notices is that there's not a DA out there who would take the time to make a proper criminal purgry case out of it... to them it's just a "clerical error" because the overall scope of the problem is so big. That's a HUGE problem from a Citizen's point of view.
It's much like the illegal search and detentions that go on all the time on our streets. Nobody in law enforcement wants to put "good" cops in jail for "assult with a deadly weapon" because they illegally pulled you over on a dark, stormy nite [with 2 9mm's pointed at your head!] The govt has given itself corperate style immunity... it's no longer another citizen approaching you with a weapon that made an error in judgement, but a "law enforcement agent" of the government that made a mistake... as if it was no different from an assembly worker that inserted a widget instead of a gadget. Given the increasing severity of the laws it's creating a huge problem where "judgement" is being used "AS" the punishment [in legal fees, hassle, ect] by other citizens...
Those thing should be off by default...it's the BSD-type philosophy versus "consumer". I'm an AS400 guy and you have to turn every feature on at least once by hand to make it work. sure it's a pain, but you learn a lot about what you are connecting to and WHY as well as what potential problems you are opening up when you add connections.
Frankly, it's just sloppiness on MS part... They used to excel at "educating" the user by creating great paths in their dev tools how to do stuff.. they have the talent to do it right they just choose to make it "brainless" than to create a method to "educate" users in the right way to use their PCs...it just takes a lot more work on their part to make it right... if anybody could "get computing right" it should be MS...they DO have all the money in the world!
What about all the other music stores out there that use wma as their format? They paid good money to MS for the rights to set up servers and use MS windows media player DRM... This is another case of MS eating it's business "partner's" lunches.
Looks like Real may be the "white knight" in this whole digital media mess! Actually, apple is pretty straightforward...they sell one product [iPod] that works with 1 service [iTMS] the fact that the songs play on PCs is just a bonus in their way of thinking.
OSS doesn't have customers in the same sense of the word. After all, if you download the source of the programs and compile them you're not acting as a customer, but your own provider!
Actually this is why Linus isn't afraid of software patents in Linux all that much. Most software patents don't include a shread of USEABLE code! so it's not like you can copy from the patent application. And REAL software is text/speech...so it never should have been patented in the first place. Try to sue users directly [in such a case as the Linux kernel] and the court would get the joke [that the emperor has no clothes!] and the whole rest of the software industry would go down in flames... OSS is the ultimate WMD in the software patent wars... Linux is a "glass house" and the first to throw stones gets the shattered glass right back...even MS isn't THAT stupid!
Re:ahem Ballmer flunks patent law
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Ballmer on Linux
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That IS what MS does.. they license patents to add the functions as reusable modules in Visual Studio... That's the whole point of their business, not cheating anybody in this case. Obviously, somebody found a loophole in the letter of the contract and exploited in court. One of MS true strong points as a "business's" business is that they really do try to clean up the messy legal issues so the people that buy the end products and the people that buy the dev tools have fullest use of them. Seriously, 1976 Bill Gates had more in common with OSS types than he lets on sometimes... He made much of his early fortune on "free" stuff just lying around...much like Red Hat does now. After all, MS [and many other IT biggies] didn't "properly" acquire much of their IT...it was a wild west mentality till the mid 80's. It's funny how the first thing people that made lots of money want is to make the means THEY used difficult or illegal!
The REAL problem is that all of the US efforts at nuclear energy are mearly thinly-veiled efforts to beef up the weapons program...they haven't put any serious effort into building reactors that contain the nasty stuff because they want to "play" with it. here in the US they've got everybody so scared they haven't built new technology in 30 years.
if you look at the examples of "good" nuclear countries like Japan or France they have little or no MILIITARY interest involved in their nuclear programs...so they design to be easy and safe... and are very successful at it. kinda makes you wonder who the "real" good guys are in all this nuclear mess.
The problem is that in a corperate setting even the best firewalls can't prevent a sloppy third-party service tech with an infected laptop [for example] from hosing your network... once one PC INSIDE the firewall is infected you're toast. Windows INSIDE a company is an open book to viruses...they use the very same ports and protocols that all the cool network administration tools use...When you have 200+ PCs you can't NOT use the admin tool... there are no programs that prevent a compromised PC from infecting the PC next to it. MS SP2 adds some features along the same lines...watching for excessive spikes in traffic on known bad ports [like 25 & 137] but of course those measures conflict with HP's software! IN a corperate setting you need better than that...because inter-network communication is essentially "trusted" so it moves very fast...often faster than the virus scanners can keep up! I've seen PCs reinfect each other right after the virus scanner stopped! short of pulling the plugs and going PC-to-PC by hand and that can be brutal!!
That's the trouble with "corperate" or "sales" tax as your base of income for a state....it's not really CAs fault for spending too much. They based their primary income on corperate tax and sales tax...and enjoyed an incredible windfall during the 90's and into 2000's... but when the dot.bomb happened all the corps took "losses" [to cover up their accounting corruption] and started laying off by the droves which stopped spending...[hence no sales taxes comming in!] CA in particular lost like 25% of it's state revenue in 1 ficsal year!!! That's the trouble with politicians setting up the tax structure so "other" people pay...and not you... The moral of the story is that "real" taxes have to be paid to keep our states running... that means employment or property taxes that are incremental every year. Sales taxes, "sin" taxes, and corperate taxes can all be avoided "at will" when times get bad.
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Why do you think they've had a 2.4 GHz chip for nearly 3 years now!!! They can't just throw them away because finished chips are still worth more than their weight in gold! but they can't just drop the prices to move chips either... that ruins the market for the future when you have to have prices back up. Intel wants to charge a little more each year instead of always the same...if they chicken out now and drop prices to move short term inventory they ruin the gradual price rising scheme...people will just wait for another chip sale!! Of course they can't release a NEW chip in these conditions either [until they clear inventory]. so that leaves them vaunerable to AMD moving in to one-up them with something new they can't market yet. It explains why the industry has been so stalled for the last 2.5-3 years now..there's no reason for 4GHZ+ chips when they can't sell the ones they already got.. but hey, it's good for business because it provides a level foundation to build from...much like 1999 and the P2/P3/CEL BX motherboards did.
frankly it shows poor taste in the judge to even keep it AT the court house... should have been gone home the same day. Many people in power [particulary southern people in power] don't like to realize that their inactions and passive actions [like keeping a penis pump anywhere near a court of law!] have unintended concequences...not to mention they set an unprofessional tone in what are really life-or-death situations for people on the other side of that bench. It's a classic case of where he left the door open for somebody to exploit his penis pump situation...and perhaps opened a door for temptation himself he wouldn't normally have had.
In all reality Bush is closer to being anti-christ than kerry...he seems hell bent on couquing the middle east for "christanity" and bringing "peace" to Jersuelem... while pressing an oppressive "stamp on your forhead" homeland security/runnaway corporation landscape back at home.
anyway it's all irrelevant because the AC [isn't that a coincidence!] will be revealed AFTER all the christians are gone [rapture, 3.5 years of bliss, then Doom on earth!] ...so stop worrying about it and pay attention to what's really going on right now!
YOUR AN AMERICAN DAMN IT! STOP VOTING YOUR RELIGION AND THINK!!!
Clinton left all the companies alone in the dot com/bomb and energy scandles...just like a good republican!! He pretty much left the ecomomy to the REPUBLICAN experts because of the republican congress...and look how they screwed it up! Now Bush has done EVERY THING the papers ridiculed Clinton for...promising elderly health care, invading small countries, ballooning the Fed Govt, and expanding "gun control" via the "patriot" act to orwellian levels... the only thing Clinton screwed up was monica's dress... Bush is tempting a third world war for the first time in 30 years, the American people just haven't figured it out yet!
Look at it this way, Republicans are successful ruling by executive fiat...as much as they are against bureacracy they seem to excel at using it as leverage for their moral crusades behind the scenes in the shadows... Democrats on the other hand seek to pull this stuff out of the shadows after the damage has been done for years using the judiciary... showing time and again where unbridaled fiat is mearly tyrany in the shadows....under a pretense of "law".
In short Democrats wouldn't appoint so many "activist" judges if the Republicans didn't abuse their authority to further their religous moral positions.
Legally they are in the clear....but if the anti-trust people are watching it's time to nail um to the wall!
Like in any good game it's all about following the rules and letting the game play out! That was THE fundamental flaw of the 2000 election...proper protocol was not followed by the media in order to create a sensation...
Stuff like this really burns me...because while they didn't like what you did, it wasn't wrong...not by a long shot... for a matter of fact what the school did by calling the sheriff WAS a criminal act...if the teacher or principle did it knowingly!!! This is the problem with our govt authority of late...you were publicly humiliated, even if you could find out that somebody outright lied it would be swept under the rug as "water under the bridge" but if you got lucky you could get some tenured teachers fired and jailed!!!
Until....
MS and real swooped in with the "streaming media" patents, and the RIAA lobbied to the FCC to change the rules so that the Radio stations couldnt' broadcast without paying outrageous fees!!!!
so after the real, paying radio stations have been effectively put out of online business, the desktop OS monopoly with deep pockets swoops in and not just mimics them but has the gull to copy their playlists...
How can they exactly copy the playlists you'd ask? because the radio stations and online stations are mandated by the FCC to send in the playlists to a PRIVATE CORPORATIION so that the royalties can be accounted for... a private corporation that is now selling those lists to MS...
The only Good THing that should be comming from this is a break-up of MS...they just added a music store over the heads of their paying customers, now they use their pull to do an end run around the local radio stations.... This should be the "step too far" because local radio is tight with the politicans...Congress will read these letters...and hopefully do something about it this time!!!
It's truely free and fully open source, support is just about as good as Red Hat or Suse [again unless you're willing to paybig bucks], forward and backward releases are supported fully...no pressure to upgrade on a company's timetable, and software compatiblity is of the highest level... In a nutshell Debian IS Linux!
What's needed in the general OSS movement is to get more corperate interest in the grassroots OSS movements... Personally, I'm a Suse fan...because they have some great IBM hardware ports [like iSeries/AS400!] but realistically, distros like Gentoo and Debian are the future of software...companies like RH & Suse are attempts to strap "traditonal" lock-in software business to OSS/Linux... they are bound to fail...and leave you holding the bag. The beauty of Gentoo and Debian is that anybody can bolt anything they want on to the very stable bases...and when the base changes it's easy to work the changes into your custom software...they are DESIGNED to do just what most companies need!!!
As far as stability and compatibility, isn't it an open joke that the current version of Debian Stable is pushing 3 years old...I'd call that a pretty reliable standard base...better than ANY of the corperate Linuii.
during the various invasions the white house "quitely hinted" that news sources were to use only OFFICAL channels and that reporting "too soon" would get them cut off. That's one reason why the prisoner abuse scandle took 6 months to play out...but enough big media outlets had the story to "call the bluff" and prevent themselves from being all cut off...otherwise we'd have never heard about it!
You mention the "freest" time being homesteading...well that's not possible anymore...in the IT world [where everything is essentially zero-value neblous ideas] everything is patents and copyrights...specifically to PREVENT other people from getting THEIR free shot! The fundamental problem with outsourcing is that it's AMERICAN companies using AMERICAN dollars [and hiding behind the AMERICAN soldier when things get bad!] their not really providing opportunities for any foriegn workers...just starting american-style corporations where those workers have FERWER rights than we do here. Note that WIPO is specifically designed to keep those "workers" and even the foreign partners from EVER starting their own companies in direct competition with our american countries...so they can never cut out the american business man...like he cut out the american worker!
except that the US doesn't manufacture many consumer goods anymore...most of those were outsorced in the 70's. Most of the US exports are food or capital equipment....the food won't be outsorced any time soon, but the capital eqipment is the crown-jewels of the country! What's being outsourced are the jobs that make american companies great...meaning that it's not important to grow those people here at home....sort of a self-fufilling prophesy.
It's not about an Indian company starting up and competing for contracts...it's about Your AMERICAN bosses taking the profits of YOUR hard work, inventiveness, and loyalty and cashing in for a quick buck for people in some petty dictatorship they don't have to pay a fair wage.
In most cases companies are spending MORE money on outsorcing and reaping far short of the returns they're supposed to...It's so bad the US SEC is trying to regulate outside countries business practices! What SHOULD be happening is to let the overseas investments hang...just like the US workers have been hung out....but that won't happen...we just send in the army to invade.... That's the REAL reason we hate Cuba so much. They were on their way to american business takeover like hawaii when the commies took over and took their country back from american business by force!! That's also why terrorism is such a big deal...because we can't REALLY lock down the country because we expect all the forigners to be trained here...and we have to protect all those american business men overseas selling our jobs from the locals that don't want them either!!!
because it's the only way she can get thru to you...I see it all the time lately...people ignoring the people around them for another "meaningless" business call. Untill one day the people "around" them get the hint and go away...they call when they really want something!!!
and THAT is why MS is "so great" for the software industry! [at least THEIR reasoning]
It's much like the illegal search and detentions that go on all the time on our streets. Nobody in law enforcement wants to put "good" cops in jail for "assult with a deadly weapon" because they illegally pulled you over on a dark, stormy nite [with 2 9mm's pointed at your head!] The govt has given itself corperate style immunity... it's no longer another citizen approaching you with a weapon that made an error in judgement, but a "law enforcement agent" of the government that made a mistake... as if it was no different from an assembly worker that inserted a widget instead of a gadget. Given the increasing severity of the laws it's creating a huge problem where "judgement" is being used "AS" the punishment [in legal fees, hassle, ect] by other citizens...
Frankly, it's just sloppiness on MS part... They used to excel at "educating" the user by creating great paths in their dev tools how to do stuff.. they have the talent to do it right they just choose to make it "brainless" than to create a method to "educate" users in the right way to use their PCs...it just takes a lot more work on their part to make it right... if anybody could "get computing right" it should be MS ...they DO have all the money in the world!
it's not like they protect the "concealed" Onstar phones from being tapped RIGHT NOW...let's give them MORE ammo!!!
Looks like Real may be the "white knight" in this whole digital media mess! Actually, apple is pretty straightforward...they sell one product [iPod] that works with 1 service [iTMS] the fact that the songs play on PCs is just a bonus in their way of thinking.
Actually this is why Linus isn't afraid of software patents in Linux all that much. Most software patents don't include a shread of USEABLE code! so it's not like you can copy from the patent application. And REAL software is text/speech...so it never should have been patented in the first place. Try to sue users directly [in such a case as the Linux kernel] and the court would get the joke [that the emperor has no clothes!] and the whole rest of the software industry would go down in flames... OSS is the ultimate WMD in the software patent wars... Linux is a "glass house" and the first to throw stones gets the shattered glass right back...even MS isn't THAT stupid!
That IS what MS does.. they license patents to add the functions as reusable modules in Visual Studio... That's the whole point of their business, not cheating anybody in this case. Obviously, somebody found a loophole in the letter of the contract and exploited in court. One of MS true strong points as a "business's" business is that they really do try to clean up the messy legal issues so the people that buy the end products and the people that buy the dev tools have fullest use of them. Seriously, 1976 Bill Gates had more in common with OSS types than he lets on sometimes... He made much of his early fortune on "free" stuff just lying around...much like Red Hat does now. After all, MS [and many other IT biggies] didn't "properly" acquire much of their IT...it was a wild west mentality till the mid 80's. It's funny how the first thing people that made lots of money want is to make the means THEY used difficult or illegal!
if you look at the examples of "good" nuclear countries like Japan or France they have little or no MILIITARY interest involved in their nuclear programs...so they design to be easy and safe... and are very successful at it. kinda makes you wonder who the "real" good guys are in all this nuclear mess.
The problem is that in a corperate setting even the best firewalls can't prevent a sloppy third-party service tech with an infected laptop [for example] from hosing your network... once one PC INSIDE the firewall is infected you're toast. Windows INSIDE a company is an open book to viruses...they use the very same ports and protocols that all the cool network administration tools use...When you have 200+ PCs you can't NOT use the admin tool... there are no programs that prevent a compromised PC from infecting the PC next to it. MS SP2 adds some features along the same lines...watching for excessive spikes in traffic on known bad ports [like 25 & 137] but of course those measures conflict with HP's software! IN a corperate setting you need better than that...because inter-network communication is essentially "trusted" so it moves very fast...often faster than the virus scanners can keep up! I've seen PCs reinfect each other right after the virus scanner stopped! short of pulling the plugs and going PC-to-PC by hand and that can be brutal!!
That's the trouble with "corperate" or "sales" tax as your base of income for a state....it's not really CAs fault for spending too much. They based their primary income on corperate tax and sales tax...and enjoyed an incredible windfall during the 90's and into 2000's... but when the dot.bomb happened all the corps took "losses" [to cover up their accounting corruption] and started laying off by the droves which stopped spending...[hence no sales taxes comming in!] CA in particular lost like 25% of it's state revenue in 1 ficsal year!!! That's the trouble with politicians setting up the tax structure so "other" people pay...and not you... The moral of the story is that "real" taxes have to be paid to keep our states running... that means employment or property taxes that are incremental every year. Sales taxes, "sin" taxes, and corperate taxes can all be avoided "at will" when times get bad.